Gratitude.

As I struggled sorting through the random assortment of thoughts I had on what I could write about next, the spirit of the season seemed to be an appropriate topic.  We had some great talks today in church on the topic of gratitude and it really helped me to reflect on my own personal state of gratitude, and how I can more consistently remember to be grateful for all of the blessings that I have been given.

I looked up the word 'gratitude' in the dictionary so that I could get a basic understanding of how it is defined by the world:

grat·i·tude

 /ˈgrætɪˌtud, -ˌtyud/ Show Spelled[grat-i-tood, -tyood]

–noun

the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful: He expressed his gratitude to everyone on the staff.

So gratitude is the quality of being grateful or thankful.  While I feel that is a quality that I possess on a fairly frequent basis, it is something that I know that I could much better at.  Mostly I think that I need to be better at really thinking about the things that I am grateful for and keeping them in the forefront of my mind.  It is often very easy for me to instead focus on things that I don't have and feel like I should, which leads to feelings of ingratitude and resentment.  Neither of those feelings lead to anything good at all, whereas gratitude leads us to happiness, peace, and contentment with the world around us and our place in it.  The obvious choice in this situation is to thus be grateful and show gratitude for what we have in order to be happy and enjoy our short existence here on earth.  Why is it then so hard (at least for me) to maintain this "attitude of gratitude" in order to have sustained happiness?  (I don't really like the phrase "attitude of gratitude" but I couldn't think of anything else to put in that spot.  The phrase just seems lame to me which is really my only basis for not liking it, and may be a contributing factor to my having a hard time maintaining gratefulness.)

I am not entirely sure why continuing in gratitude seems so difficult to me, but I think it tends to be a state of mind more than anything else.  In fact, when I think of the times that I am the most grateful in my life it comes down to basically two different scenarios which encompass the vast majority of the gratitude that I display.  My gratitude is as I stated earlier either a product of: 1. a grateful mindset that I come about by keeping my blessings in perspective and trusting in the Lord, or 2. from my being compelled to have gratitude for the things I have in my life when some of the blessings I normally enjoy are taken away from me.  (See my 'sick.' post from before for more on this scenario.)  The trick I think is how do we avoid the second scenario as much as we can by focusing on being better at the first scenario?  This seems to be one of the great challenges of life, at least for me.  Maintaining an upbeat and bubbly personality is not necessarily what I am known for, and for some reason I enjoy commiserating with people about different situations in life.  However, I need to remember that although this life will give EVERYONE ample opportunities to complain about something, we need to be happy with our lot and enjoy the moments we live in.  Something that could be considered unfortunate or unpleasant will happen every day, but being grateful for and searching out opportunities to give thanks and show gratitude for what we have on a day to day basis is how we can make it through.  I plan on working on this over the next little while and hope to make some progress to becoming more like the ever grateful people that I admire very much.  Should be a fun time, and I am GRATEFUL for the opportunity!  11-21-10